Execution Of A Killer Anticipated

June 10, 2001|By William E. Gibson Washington Bureau Chief

The highly publicized execution of Timothy McVeigh, set for Monday morning, has turned into a media-saturated 21st-century version of the ancient hanging day of yore, when village folk would gather in the town square to see an evildoer put to death.

Most evidence suggests that the death penalty does not significantly deter crime, but it does give many people a sense that justice will be done.

In the case of McVeigh, a mass murderer and terrorist, the heinous nature of his crime and the horror it produced have created a widespread desire for closure, if not catharsis.

Everything about the Oklahoma City bombing that McVeigh set off six years ago has been a shared national experience -- the initial shock, the confusion, the anger, the sympathy for families of the victims.

McVeigh's conviction brought a collective sense of relief, and his execution is seen by many as a way to exorcise the demon of terrorism.

And yet, public reaction to McVeigh's death march was muted last week. While his crime bolstered public support for the death penalty, it seemed that much of the anger has been spent and the desire for vengeance already satisfied by the knowledge that his brazen hope of arousing political violence so clearly faltered.

For many, closure already has come and McVeigh's execution by chemical injection at a federal prison in Indiana is a long-delayed anti-climax.

"Everyone abhorred this act of terror. And everyone is satisfied that he failed," observed the Rev. Ronald J. Dingle, senior pastor at the Advent Lutheran Church in Boca Raton. "He thought people were going to rise up on behalf of paramilitary groups and take a stand against the federal government. But just the opposite happened."

The militia's decline

"There is a satisfaction in knowing that terrorism is not going to affect the American people in the way he intended. If anything, it will unite people against that kind of radicalism and use of force," Dingle said. "That is a satisfactory conclusion for me. I'm not sure executions are part of that catharsis."

Rather than serve as a rallying cry, the Oklahoma City blast in 1995 led to the rapid decline of the right-wing militia movement that McVeigh had hoped to ignite.

"It went underground. People wanted to get distanced from more radical or extreme elements," Randy Trochman, co-founder of the Militia of Montana, said two years ago when asked about the decline of the movement in the aftermath of the courthouse bombing.

"I don't have anything to do with any of that any more," he said last week when asked about militia reaction to the planned execution. "I haven't even been following it."

Pollsters and others who take the public pulse said McVeigh's crime, which decimated a block-long federal courthouse and killed 168 adults and children, hardened the public's attitude about the death penalty, at least in his case.

Opposition to the death penalty has been gradually increasing in recent years, in part because of revelations of new DNA evidence suggesting that some people sentenced to death have been wrongly convicted.

A Newsweek poll in May found that 25 percent opposed the death penalty in all cases, up from 19 percent a year earlier and 17 percent in 1995.

Opposition to McVeigh's execution, however, has been relatively limited.

"McVeigh is one case in which some who normally oppose the death penalty would say he deserves it, just because of the magnitude of what he did," said Hugh Gladwin, director of the Institute for Public Opinion Research at Florida International University. That includes Gladwin himself.

"McVeigh makes me angry, so it's on the emotional level," he said. "There's not much good evidence that it works to reduce the crime rate. What keeps it going is the emotional desire for vengeance."

The act of terror upset the public's sense of order far more than typical violent crimes do. The details of the horrible scene were widely broadcast. Victims in the courthouse were literally blown to bits. The attack seemed to come out of nowhere, striking deep in the country's heartland, killing people who had no reason to fear death on that day. The deaths of children playing innocently in a child-care center made the tragedy especially poignant.

Restoring a sense of order by catching the villain and convicting him is far more important in the public mind than actually executing him, some security experts and psychologists believe.

`A sense of relief'

"It's not the death penalty and execution that creates a sense of finality, it's the conviction of a terrorist who has robbed us of our innocence and stirred our deepest fears," said Mitchell Hammer, director of the Center for Crisis Response and Management at American University in Washington.

"For some of the victims, yes, it can give them a sense of final justice. But for the public at large, justice was achieved when he was convicted. That's what gives us restored confidence and a sense of order."